The invention relates generally to wheel cover assemblies for vehicular wheels. More specifically, the invention pertains to a retention nut capturing arrangement for such wheel covers.
It is known to provide retention arrangements for wheel covers utilizing retention nuts having an internally threaded bore for engagement with a threaded portion of a lug stud extending from a vehicle wheel mounting hub. The threaded portion of the lug stud utilized in the known arrangement extends beyond a standard tightened lug nut retaining a tire wheel to the vehicle mounting hub. In this manner, wheel covers may be mounted to a vehicle wheel following the mounting of the wheel itself to the vehicle.
While this known arrangement provides improvements in some applications over prior arrangements which relied on frictional engagement of a portion of the wheel cover with a radially inward facing annular surface of the rim portion of a wheel, it does still suffer from a disadvantage in that the wheel retaining nuts may become misplaced when the wheel cover is removed from its coupled arrangement with the lug stud of the vehicular wheel mounting hub. Therefore, the present invention is directed to an improvement over such known wheel cover retention arrangements utilizing the above described retention nut arrangement, wherein the wheel cover itself includes means for releasably capturing the mounting nuts even when the wheel cover is not coupled to a vehicular wheel.